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38 thoughts on “The Bioethics Of Mars One”

It does bring up the subject of the naked elephant in the room. I think it will be inevitable that the pron industry will likely be one of the first space habitat customers. They have the bucks and most likely a long list of volunteer actors willing to take the risk, for some cash. The question will be do they purchase their own space studio or will someone rent to them. That still leaves clean-up in either case.

I’m thinking this should be sort of an Old Man’s War scenario. Only healthy people past a certain age should be considered to start the colony, with new team members sent to replace those who die. (And yes, I’d go!!!)

Once the colony is established and the proper research in to the child bearing of primates is done…only then should younger couples be allowed to migrate. Of course…this demographic wouldn’t play well for “reality TV”.

No one said anything about “buying” a way to Mars. We’re talking about starting a colony…and whoever starts that colony, whether it be goobernment or private enterprise, will very much have the final say in who goes.

We’ve already been over my opinion of your lack of trust in your fellow humans’ abilities to make their own decisions, so I won’t repeat it. Instead, let me ask you, who’s the jerk that broke the comment section on PJ Media? Looks like they failed string escaping.

And there is no ethical quandary at all. Individuals have picked up stakes and moved elsewhere all through human history. Sometimes it has taken awhile, perhaps generations, to adapt to new environments that lack, say sunlight for vitamin D. Those who are wimps will stay on Earth and wish they could control the decisions of others so as not to look like cowards in comparison. Those who do go, will do their share of dying on the frontier… and they will *be* the future of the human species. The ones who stay on Earth are the australopithecenes when looked at from the far future.

The ones who stay on Earth are the australopithecenes when looked at from the far future.

Not to worry. I’m sure there will be plenty of people in the far future that share your master race ideology who’ll round them up for the extermination camps.

But for the present you’ll have to continue to rub shoulders with these subhumans who can’t recognize your genetic superiority. Perhaps you and your like minded friends can wear distinctive arm bands or something so the rest of us will know whom we’re dealing with? Maybe shirts of a certain color?

Jim, are you saying people that choose to go could have no qualities different from those that stay?

No. I’m saying that drawing conclusions about superiority, genetic or otherwise, based on where one chooses to live or what personal enthusiasms one has is irrational at best, dangerous at worst.

What does this have to do with genetics?

Dale’s comparison of people who stay on Earth to an extinct hominid species was a not so subtle implication of genetic inferiority, wouldn’t you agree? He could have hardly made his point clearer if he’d used the dodo or the dinosaurs.

Suppose somebody takes their family, with some difficultly, from some hell hole on earth to some garden spot on earth. Is it totally inappropriate to speculate that person represents different qualities that those that made no attempt?

Recently I read an article about a bridge that fell leaving people in the water below. That article speculated that America had changed much in that they docilely waited for rescue rather than swimming to shore.

Suppose somebody takes their family, with some difficultly, from some hell hole on earth to some garden spot on earth. Is it totally inappropriate to speculate that person represents different qualities that those that made no attempt?

Certainly not. It would also be entirely appropriate to speculate that the ones that take their families, with some difficultly, from some garden spot on earth to some hell hole on earth represent different qualities than those who made no attempt to do so. Your point, if you have one, is escaping me.

Recently I read an article about a bridge that fell leaving people in the water below. That article speculated that America had changed much in that they docilely waited for rescue rather than swimming to shore.

This is so true. I read somewhere that 40 years ago that ambulances built to handle 300 lb patients were adequate for all but the most extreme cases. Nowadays, they have to be built for 600 lb patients to handle the same percentile. But again, I’m afraid your point eludes me.

Dale’s comment seemed pretty innocuous even with his hyperbole about wimps.

If he’d been content with “wimps” I would agree that would have been fairly innocuous. It’s the “australopithecenes” comment that’s way over the top. If he’s the Dale Amon I’ve heard of (and how many people with that name can there be?) he’s an official with the Space Frontier Foundation or the National Space Society (I forget which). Can you imagine either of those organizations issuing statements comparing people who aren’t interested in living on Mars to australopithecenes?

I simply did not understand your response and my query was an attempt to do so. That’s all.

The connection between my response to Dale and your query still escapes me.

In my understanding, we still have a paucity of information on fertilization, gestation, birth, and post-birth development in microgravity. That data would help us at least bound the gravity related risks, and we don’t need a gravity lab to get started.

Send up mice to the ISS – and keep them there. Let them try to breed, have offspring, and monitor any offspring (and possible subsequent generations) for developmental differences from 1G mice. If the next resupply mission to the ISS doesn’t have a fully manifested cargo capacity it could potentially be done on the next trip up.

Also, a gravity lab built for mice could be a lot smaller than one for humans. They are much shorter, so I anticipate they’d be able to handle much smaller rotation axis than humans can without getting sick from vertigo. You could fit such a lab into a dragon capsule to take to the ISS to bolt on outside (certainly in parts).

My point was that if we can capture mammalian developmental risks at 0G, in addition to our plethora of data at 1G, we will have bounded any potential gravity related development problems we are likely to see on any celestial body with gravity less than Earth’s.

As a hypothetical, if 0G development destroys vestibular sense development leaving babies without our normal means of determining our attitude in a gravitational field, but nothing more life threatening than that, we will know that Mars’s or Luna’s lesser gravity will not have effects that are any worse.

Or as a more scary hypothetical (which I don’t conceive would be this extreme), 0G obviating any bone development in mammals leaving 0G offspring as squishes worse than any lib 😉 and ultimately in a state inimical to human life (as we all know ;).

Even having that 0g data point isn’t enough, as we cannot assume that the detrimental effects of low gravity follow a linear relationship. It could turn out that gestation is fine right down to 0.05 gee, or it could turn out that anything less than 0.8 gee is catastrophic. We’d need a variable gravity centrifuge and a lot of mice, but finding out is doable.

Also, I don’t understand why ‘unethical’ is being used to describe conceiving on Mars (or elsewhere not Earth).

But when it comes to bringing new human life involuntarily into a world with a very high, or at least completely unknown risk of debilitating or even agonizing results…

This and more happens all the time, right here on Earth. To the extent the concept makes any sense whatsoever, any birth is involuntary for the baby, only the parents had volition in the child’s creation. Likewise, all babies are born with uncertain futures.

There are many non-viable babies born every day (not to mention miscarriages). Some can be helped, with modern technology and procedures, to become functioning or semi-functioning humans – many can’t. A lot of babies, today and historically, are born into agonizing conditions. We rightly don’t consider it ethical to prevent their parents from breeding.

Ultimately, the only ethical question related to creating offspring (in any environment) is: will having a child improve my life? If you can’t answer that in the affirmative, the choice would be unethical.